Monthly Archives: April 2007

Just a couple of days left until MIX07 starts. I cleverly evaded responsibility for conference preparations early this year, but have recently been roped in to help with an interesting new project. This year we will be letting you follow along from home, with news updates, interviews, demos, and sessions posted throughout the 72 hours. […]

Last week I bumped into Ted Leung at a party near Moscone in San Francisco. Since he wasn’t attending the conference, and he normally works from home here in the Northwest, I assumed he was doing something interesting. He wouldn’t give me many details, and I figured he would blog about it soon. Turns out […]

Alec Baldwin, talking to an answering machine: “You have humiliated me for the last time with this phone”. There certainly is humiliation and a phone involved, but I think that statement was just the start. Alec Baldwin, didn’t you promise to leave the country? There is no reason for an answering machine to put up […]

Session: Understanding User Behavior at Scale, Andy Edmonds Andy was search quality analyst at MSFT, now at FreeIQ in Atlanta. Discussing some MSR research on predictive models for user’s search relevance judgment. Going into detail about how MSFT improved search relevance (and what we did right and wrong) since 2004 up till now. Interesting charts […]

(Raw notes, updated throughout the day, reverse-chronological) Session: Dojo Offline Toolkit Brad Neuberg, discussing Dojo Offline Toolkit. Interesting premise. They have built a 300k runtime to handle offline support, “super cookies” and “browser-agnostic cache”. I’m having trouble understanding the relationship between this and Dojo. It adds a namespace dojo.off, and changes dojo.storage. But is it […]

(Raw notes, updated throughout the day, will be adding content reverse-chronological) “High Order Bit” (Demos) Apollo demos. Showing the same ebay demo we’ve seen before. It’s very nice. Demos a salesforce.com client (amazing), and Buzzword. Their media player demo isn’t as nice. They would have had far more people at the session this morning if […]

The U.N. is actually recommending that adult males in Africa be circumcised, and New York City is considering the same. This is astonishing, not only because it is wacky science, but because it is the quintessential 3,000 years-old example of wacky science. Basically, the U.N. did the work to show that men who were circumcised […]

I noticed some strange behavior when visiting some of the few SharePoint-based blogs out on the wild Internets. First, on home.infusionblogs.com, I was prompted with “This website wants to run the following add-on”. It’s apparently signed by Microsoft, but the name is ‘Name ActiveX Control’. Was this a case where someone forgot to name the […]

Tim is acknowledging that he ruffled some feathers with his approach to blogger’s code of conduct. But the trolls still are busy trying to drown the conversation and change the subject. I was having trouble understanding why some of these people were so angry at Tim, until I found the blog of the dude who […]

Tim O’Reilly is drawing some irrational criticism for proposing a voluntary code of conduct for comment boards. Hundreds of boards already have codes of conduct, and the mob never complained about that, so apparently the issue is just that people hate Tim. Or they hate that an a-lister is promoting civility and recommending others do the same. […]